Del Amitri / 2CD deluxe reissues

Waking Hours (1989), Change Everything(1992), and Twisted (1995) will all be re-released as two-CD deluxe editions on Universal Music’s Re-presents imprint. The albums have been re-mastered from the original tapes and include new sleeve notes by music journalist Terry Staunton. Each is packaged with a second CD containing mainly B-sides.
The Scottish band’s hits included Nothing Ever Happens, Kiss This Thing Goodbye, Always The Last To Know and the surprise US top ten hit Roll To Me.

Del Amitri will also tour next year for the first time in over a decade. The reissues are out on 20 January 2014.

10 responses to Del Amitri / 2CD deluxe reissues

Three years after their previous album, the superb Change Everything and with a lot of touring under their belts, Del Amitri returned with the album that singer / bassist Justin Currie measures their other work against. It was a splendid, mature piece of work and well worth the wait.

Starting with ‘Food for songs’ – an exceptional opener and soon a concert favourite, was a really good move. Currie’s voice is suitably distorted, the frenetic guitars and a wailing blues harp versus the bass and drums whip up a storm.

‘Start with me’ is the closest thing I have ever heard to a Thin Lizzy track without Phil Lynott on it. Brilliant close vocal harmonies spit out brilliant lyrics until the guitar solos turn into twin-lead epics. Those who remember the band for the tuneful but maudlin ‘Nothing ever happens’ and little else would be stunned by this. Harvie and Cummings trade licks just like Gary Moore and Scott Gorham, or Brian Robertson.

‘Here and now’ is one of those songs that has stood the test of time very well without dating at all and Justin Currie still plays it in his set nowadays to a superb response. This gently strummed song recalls the best of The Faces – one of the dels’ favourite bands. Andy Alston plays perfect organ and piano parts and the guitar contributions are really measured and spot on. Justin Currie’s voice soars on this and the singalong chorus is irresistible.

‘One thing left to do’ is Del Amitri at the deepest and most bluesy. A song about suicide. Mainly quiet to allow Currie’s falsetto vocal to shine, it builds to a few tense climax points and the sombre mood suits the song perfectly.

‘Tell her this’ is a three-minute folky strum with a wonderfully inventive bass counter-melody part that foxes most bassists trying to reproduce it. Driven mainly by two sprightly acoustic guitars and an accordion, Currie’s plaintive vocals again shine. This remains in his set to this day.

‘Being somebody else’ remained a show-stopping grunge epic on their ‘reunion’ tours in 2014 and 2018. A bit psychedelic in its feel, with superb, driven guitars. The Dels certainly prove they are capable of rocking out in this six and a half minute song about drug enhancement and a bad trip. At two and a half minutes, they have an ascending unison band riff worthy of Led Zeppelin that collapses into a 1971 Alice Cooper style guitar riff. You have to hear this song at volume to really appreciate its wonderfulness.

‘Roll to me’ is a song that bought both of its writers houses, so they are not that scathing about it. It is a bright breezy pop single that sticks out like a sore thumb on this rock-driven album. They employ several tricks on this song, like panning all but the electric 12 string guitar and lead vocal to one speaker, like the Beatles did in the 1960’s. The Beatlesque harmonies are also a dead giveaway. This song absolutely deserved its release as a single and its massive US success, but it typecast the band again as lightweight popsters, so the rest of this album may have confused the people who bought it after hearing the song.

‘Crashing down’ is the exact opposite of ‘Roll to me’. Every bit as tuneful, it’s a deeply moody and heavy melodic song, again with drug references, so no use as a single.

‘It might as well be you’ starts off with a quiet organ-driven bluesy feel, before climbing to one of their best ever epic singalong choruses, followed by a truly epic guitar solo, before descending back to the depths again. Majestic.

‘Never enough’ has riffing guitars aplenty and a superb Currie vocal – he is on top form on this record, though he has never turned in a vocal anyone would call iffy.

‘It’s never too late to be alone’ – a wonderful breakup song – would have been a massive hit in the USA if it had been released as a single… by someone like Bon Jovi. The Dels never gained the status in America that they deserved and ‘Roll to me’ never went off the radio to allow the other singles from this album the air-time that they needed.

I didn’t realise it for a long time, but ‘Driving with the brakes on’ is a marvelous essay about the hideous guilt and deep regrets of a couple after an abortion. It is not immediately clear from the lyrics, but it is there. Looking at the lyrics, the meaning of the song is inescapable. I never heard the song the same way again after knowing about the subject matter, which certainly was not cuddly enough for US radio. Again, Currie still plays this in his shows today and it is a truly remarkable song.

“Driving through the long night, trying to figure who’s right and who’s wrong, now the kid has gone.
I sit belted up tight. She sucks on a match light, glowing bronze, steering on.
And I might be more a man if I stopped this in its tracks and said come on, let’s go home.
But she’s got the wheel and I’ve got nothing except what I have on.

When you’re driving with the brakes on. When you’re swimming with your boots on,
It’s hard to say you love someone. And it’s hard to say you don’t.

Trying to keep the mood right, trying to steer the conversation from the thing we’ve done.
She shuts up the ashtray and I say it’s a long way back now hon – And she just yawns.
And we might get lost someplace, so desolate that no one where we’re from would ever come
But she’s got the wheel and I’ve got to deal from now on.

‘Twisted’ originally came with a bonus live disc containing really solid, enjoyable versions of the following: Hatful of rain, When I want you, Crashing down, Move away Jimmy Blue, The ones that you love lead you nowhere and Stone cold sober.

If you can find a copy of the deluxe reissue from 2014, Disc 2 contains some absolute revelations.

Buy the time I got into the Dels, it was far enough along that each album had a bonus disc, or extra live attachment etc. So these earlier releases getting touched up is a nice effort (years ago, the very first DA album also finally made it’s way back to CD….) Hopefully the reunion dates spread to the USA a bit too….

Wow I cannot wait for this, I can see in my iTunes that “Changes everything” is in my top ten all time played albums. I can say that this is a huge win for me as a lover of Dels and as collector. And those are three just Awsome albums really.

When this campaign was announced I e-mailed Paul at this site about anomalies on the proposed extras discs, and he kindly put me in touch with a chap at Universal, to whom I sent a pdf with the tracks I felt should be included in each package.

Happy to say that the first two albums turned out almost exactly as I requested (yes!!!) – although I personally would have packaged Scared To Live with Waking Hours, since it was a Spit B-side) – but the Twisted extra disc looks very odd.

It’s not just the missing live B-sides, of which there are several. Of greater concern is the fact that they’ve neglected to include Someone Else Will – a B-side to Here and Now, and one of their finest non-album cuts.

These look like pretty comprehensive sets at a first glance.
The B sides from the first album are almost as good as the songs that made the album.
Well priced too.
Surprised they didn’t do the final two albums while they were at it.

I’ve been a huge Dels fans since the release of “Waking Hours” and have collected every (very expensive) import single over the years. I haven’t checked to see if every b-side has been included on these three reissues, but it looks like they got the majority of them…and I can confirm that most of their b-sides are as strong as their singles & album tracks. Justin Currie has one of the best (and most distinctive) voices I’ve ever heard, and his secret weapon is his ability to write consistently great bridges. They’re like mini songs lurking inside. I hope these reissues expose their music to a lot of people who may have written them off during the ’90s.